Chan Hau-chun Illuminates Contemporary Hong Kong

Description

Chan Hau-chun makes a debut at Empty Gallery with an exhibition that foregrounds her quietly radical approach to moving image art. Known for diaristic intimacy and empathetic distance, Chan engages directly with individuals and communities who rarely appear in official narratives, offering a nuanced portrait of Hong Kong’s affective and social landscape.

The centrepiece is Map of Traces, a new essay film that weaves together landscape cinema, autobiography, and guerrilla reportage. Structured around letters to an imprisoned friend, the film explores how memory, loss, and personal history are entangled with the city’s shifting spaces after the protests. Chan’s reflections — “If history is always tied to events, then memory is like a hidden shape, waiting for the right moment to resurface” — set the tone for a meditation on the fragile, resistant qualities of memory.

Episodes range from remote recollections of Nathan Road to encounters with a street artist and the muted rebellion of music learned in confinement. Rather than linger on trauma, Chan balances the visible and the off-screen, transforming Hong Kong’s landscape into a site of vulnerability and dignity.

A graduate of City University of Hong Kong, Chan has exhibited widely and screened at international festivals. Her work at Empty Gallery offers a poetic and empathetic lens on contemporary Hong Kong.